Aviator90 Episode 30

[intro music]

Chris Palmer: [1:11] Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Aviator 90,
Angle of Attack. I am Chris Palmer and today Aviator 90, episode 29
is altitude from flight level, not flight level, but 117,000. I’m
on my way to North Dakota for a little trip and we are currently
plugging along at 205 knots and pretty cool stuff. I’ll adjust the
camera here a bit and turn this down a little bit.
[1:38] I don’t expect the radio call for a while. All right, so, at
any rate, I’ll be talking about fuel planning and performance. So,
let’s start right out with typewriting right into it fuel planning.
You need to know your aircraft. You need to know what it can and
can’t do. For example, this aircraft has an endurance or ex-
training the air base for three and half hours.

[2:13] That includes the reserve fuel of 45 minutes. I always do 45
minutes whether it is day or night or whatever. That’s always my
personal minimum on that and that’s in another episode that I also
consider that 45 minutes to be unburnable. I don’t want to ever
have to use that fuel. It’s there for my safety. It’s extra just in
case something goes wrong.

[2:45] And that’s very important to have. Along those same lines,
it’s always important to know what’s ahead of you and know what
challenges could arise that would challenge your fuel calculations.
Things like weather. IFR requirements, instrument flight rules,
requirements for fuel is much different than VFR because you just
can’t count on the weather always being what it says it is going to
be.

[3:22] So, the weather is below a certain amount where you have to
have way different rules. The VFR though, for what you are doing of
Aviator 90 it’s 30 minutes per day time flight. 30 minutes extra.
For nighttime it’s 45. Now, another thing we can talk about. It’s
getting a little bumpy here. Another thing we can talk about is
conserving your fuel. Conserving fuel is very important and you
can’t just have your mixture all the way forward all the time.

[4:00] Now, your mixture is what controls the amount of fuel you
are putting into the engine. The air down at sea level is much
thicker than the air say up here at 17,000 today. So, it’s going to
burn more fuel down at that thicker air. So, as you climb or
descend, you basically match your mixture to the amount of air that
is in the area. And the way I deal with this aircraft, the way that
I set up to go is with temperature.

[4:23] So, I just make sure that I follow it to a certain
temperature and then air exposure as far as that’s concern. Another
nice thing about this aircraft and also, you guys, the mixture and
the temperature and stuff is I’m talking about this. Another nice
thing about this aircraft is the range ring, it shows me my reserve
line and my empty line of fuel.

[4:46] And that’s great to have as well. It is not something that a
lot of aircraft have. It is going to become more common with your
GPS type of stuff and there’s not great GPS modeling for this type
of thing with the flight simulator right now. But flight simulator
does do a really good job to give you accurate fuel calculations.

[5:20] You are not going to get the actual discrepancies that
happen with fuel tanks over the years because some gauges just
degrade over time and those calculations, not calculations, but
those indications on fuel gauges can get pretty bad sometimes where
they are not accurate anymore. It is just like a car. If you never
let anyone in the car or yourself, then either the top end of the
fuel is very, very like the needle will move for a while or the
bottom end.

[5:49] It just sits there empty forever. The aircraft are basically
the same way. I would dare say that they are a little bit more
simplistic of a system than a car because for the most part with
airplanes, manufacturers that make it are also concern of the
waste. They don’t add the extra bills and whistles that you see in
cars. That is a weird tangent. I don’t even know why even I talked
about that.

[6:13] So, mixture is very important. Make sure that you are always
conserving all the fuel that you have because overtime during your
flight, even an extra half gallon per hour, even if the tenth of a
gallon per hour can make a big difference over the duration of your
flight. So, that is very important as well. One of the golden rules
about fuel, you just don’t mess with it.

[6:42] If you need to stop, if you are unsure of the fact you are
going to reach your destination, you are going to cut it to your
reserve. Just stop and refuel. Honestly, there are so many stories
of people pushing beyond below and running out of fuel. It’s so
simple. Just have enough fuel on board and you never have to run
out of fuel. There’s really actually no excuse for it.

[7:14] And I’ve never been… I’m not bragging or anything but I’ve
never put myself in a situation where I have been running below to
the point where I was nervous about it. I have dogged it maybe five
or ten minutes before my reserve before but that’s it. Other than
that, everything was completely closure. And even though
situations, those are situations where I wasn’t even planning on
that. That was a situation where the heads are much more difficult.

[7:39] The traffic control factor be different places. I didn’t
plan that sort of thing. All right, so that’s it for fuel. You just
need to know what you can or can’t do. It’s a matter of getting
fuel. Think of flight simulator, see if you can get comfortable
with that but always remember that stop if you need to stop around
the stuff because it is better safe than sorry.

[7:50] Well, let’s talk about performance now. One of the big
things about performance is weight and balance, and we’ll break
that up. First, let’s talk about weight.

[8:15] Now, weight is very important. Each aircraft is built and
tested with a certain maximum weight. This aircraft, for example,
has a maximum weight of 4,000 pounds. That gives me 1,367 pounds of
payload to play with.

And that’s not necessarily payload, but payload, passengers and
fuel. So, it’s called the useful load. And that’s everything on the
aircraft. That’s this pen. That’s this water bottle, camera,
[indecipherable 08: [8:34] 30] . Everything on board is part of
that useful load.

[8:57] And you cannot go over that. It’s just not smart to. And
we’ll explain that more as we go on, here. So, that brings us to
the next part, which is balance. Balance is… there’s a center of
gravity in the aircraft where there’s a point where, basically, you
can set the aircraft on a little point, and it would sit there and
balance, right?

[9:15] And that’s in theory. Obviously, if you set the aircraft on
some sort of pencil, it’s not just going to sit there and balance.
There’s a point where that balance is. If you have too much weight
in the back of the aircraft, that balance is going to be way back
there where it’s not supposed to be.

[9:33] The aircraft and the wings, and everything were not made to
operate within that situation. Therefore, it acts out of its normal
tested range, which is not good. So, that becomes particularly
dangerous when you are talking about stalls.

[9:51] If you have an aft center of gravity when you’re talking
about a stall, then that means that… we talked about stalls… I
can’t remember the episode number of Aviator 90. You go up into a
stall. And, basically, once a stall occurs, you get the little
buffer and it tries to fall down.

[10:05] You lower the nose to the horizon; you push full power if
you don’t already have it. And you accelerate to where you’re good
to go. And then you pull up again. And a positive rate of climb,
right?

[10:17] However, if you have a center of gravity… just imagine
trying to push that thing over and it doesn’t want to push over.
Just imagine not having a say in what the aircraft does, and it
just stays in that stall the whole time.

[10:32] That is now good news, guys. That is not a situation that I
would ever like to find myself in. And there’s actually been
situations with cargo airliners where the weight would shift to the
back of the airplane and it’s made it very dangerous, especially in
landing.

[10:50] And there’s been accidents of a situation like that
happening. All right. So, that’s it for balance, basically. If I
was to choose the lesser of two evils, I’d rather have a forward
center of gravity; one that’s outside the envelope.

[11:02] There is an envelope where you can operate either side,
that is safe for operation of the aircraft. Now, as you go on
throughout the flight and burn fuel, that center of gravity and
weight actually changes.

[11:14] You’ve got to make sure that you’re within limitations at
the beginning at the flight and the end of the flight. The cool
thing about Flight simulator is; even default Flight Simulator does
a lot of those calculations for you.

[11:45] All right. So, now to density altitude. I talked about this
a little bit in one of the last episodes; the last episode or the
one before. And, basically, density altitude is much like the
mixture we were talking about where the air is thicker down at sea
level than it is at 7,000 or somewhere like Denver or Utah where
the elevation is fairly high.

[12:18] Basically, it’s a very dangerous situation, let me just say
it like that. Because there are less particles per air, the
aircraft doesn’t perform as well at a higher density altitude. So
you’re going to have longer take-off rolls, longer landing rolls.
Your climb isn’t going be as great.

[12:45] Cruise is a different situation. Generally it is better to
have thinner air when you are cruising, but we won’t get into that,
at least not now. So what becomes dangerous is when you have a high
gross weight and a high density altitude. You try and you are
trying to take off on a 3,000 foot runway with a twin engine
airplane.

[13:03] Even a single engine airplane there is stories of people
loading up a single engine airplane with their whole family and all
these bags for a big family vacation and full fuel, just loaded to
the gills. You can get away with that at sea level and get some OK
performance.

[13:35] But once you get up to some greater density altitudes, you
burn up a lot of runway. These people, it’s a mixture of they can’t
get off the runway and they panic when they see how bad the
performance is. And you just have to be very diligent in making
sure your density altitude is in check and that you do your
calculations, which brings us to the next point, which is your take
-off and landing calculations.

[14:04] Generally you’re going to be very familiar with your
aircraft, you’re going to know what it can and can’t do. Especially
to start it’s always smart to do your own take-off and landing
performance. and then you’ll get a feel for what it can and can’t
do. But if you’re in doubt, if it’s a very hot day in summer…
that’s the thing about density altitude.

[14:23] High in altitude, hot in temperature, and humid, what the
humidity is, any one of those or any mix of the three can increase
your density altitude. So if there’s a concern about density
altitude, your take-off and landing performance.

[14:56] Alright guys, so I had a little cut-off in the video there,
but I am back. The last thing I was talking about was density
altitude and being diligent with take-off and landing performance
data. And the climb and cruise phase is pretty straightforward.
Basically, the climb phase, you’re going to get familiar with that,
and as we talked about density altitude, and the mixture and
whatnot, your ascent rate, your climb, will decrease as the
altitude increases.

[15:07] It makes sense, because the air is thinner up here, you
don’t climb as well, the performance isn’t as well, it’s the same
reason you can’t take off from a high-altitude runway that well.

That does it for this episode, join me next time as I talk about
flight planning. I will talk a little bit about what my decision
was today, and how the different factors affected what route we
took today, and then we’ll talk about flight simulators’ ways of
flight plan. Well that’s it for now. Until next time: [15:41]
Throttle lock.

Transcription by CastingWords